App Inventor Summit Archive 2013

The MIT Center for Mobile Learning hosted a two-day summit in Cambridge, MA on July 17-18, 2013. App Inventor 2 was unveiled at this meeting and many discussions and small working groups were held to go over related topics for future work on App Inventor and App Inventor 2. Also, invited presenters shared the work they have done with App Inventor. Below is the schedule with relevant links to presentations or notes from the App Inventor Summit speakers and attendees.

Day 1: Wednesday July 17, 2013

Welcome & Intro

Welcome and Intro Slides

1. Welcoming remarks: Hal Abelson
2. Team Introductions: Caitlin Feeley, Project Manager
3. Education Projects & Summit Overview: Shay Pokress, Education Program Manager
4. Introducing App Inventor 2: Andrew McKinney, Senior Software Developer & Technical Lead

Playground Time to Test Out App Inventor 2

Participants were given time to test out App Inventor 2 on their own devices or ours. Check out the links below to try it yourself

• Play with App Inventor 2
• Read the App Inventor 2 Documentation
• Give Us Your Feedback About App Inventor 2

Breakout Session A: Technical & Development

This session featured presentors from the Technical and Development side of App Inventor. They discussed new work involving sensing, NFC, data connections, and AppScale.

1. Fuming Shih & Wei Li - Sensing and Cloud
2. Michael Phox & Arun Saigal - NFC
3. Lalana Kagal - Data connections
4. Jovan Chohan - AppScale

Breakout Session B: App Inventor in the World

1. Eni Mustafaraj - Apps for & by college students
2. Jere Boudell - Eco Hackathon
3. Leo Burd- App Inventor for Good
4. Raquel Fernandez Martin - unX Entrepreneurship
5. Yu-Chang Hsu - Camps/programs for students

Panel: Visual Programming Languages

Day 2: Thursday July 18, 2013

Working Groups

1. Curriculum & Learning Resources (Shay Pokress) Notes From Working Group & Summary Powerpoint
2. Community Development & Outreach (Josh Sheldon) Notes From Working Group
3. Research/Partnerships (Leo Burd) Notes From Working Group
4. Development (Andrew McKinney) Notes From Working Group

Poster Hall

Visiting students presented posters on various projects related to App Inventor. Here's a list of students with some links to their projects. And here's the link to photos from the poster session: Poster Photos

• Students of Jim Smith's Mechanical and Industrial Engineering 379: Intro to Optimization and Operations Research class. Here is a list of topics presented in the posters from his class: Tool Wear Optimization, Disk Brake design optimization, Diet planning with the Analytical Hierarch Process, Economic decision making analysis, Track team assignment optimization, Business mailing optimization.
• Audrey Bennett & student Moriah: "Algorhythms" App: Designed by high school student Moriah Harling using MIT App Inventor. This app accompanies an online exhibition (a cs4hs.rpi.edu) that explores the rhythmic visual structure of computational art. Using the Culturally-Situated Design Tolls (csdt.rpi.edu) developed at Rensselaer, high school art students investigated the computational structure of traditional cultural arts through simulations, created their own algorithms, and finished with a physical, artistic rendering of their virtual designs. Here's the link to the Audrey's pdf and Moriah's pdf of the posters.
• Eric Beikman: Compass to Your Friends App. Here's a link to the pdf of the poster
• Mohamed Fadlalla: The Jungle: Educational App For Kids. Here's the link to the pdf of the poster.
• David Meehan: Geography: Discover the World Here's a link to the pdf of the poster
• Deniz Yetil & Chinedum Uche: Members of a group of five high school girls that created the app ExerciseU to help college students combat the infamous Freshman 15 and motivate them to exercise in the tightest of schedules, that was made as an entry into the 2013 Technovation Challenge and was given Honorable Mention. ExerciseU users can choose between zumba, yoga, and strength exercises, track their progress up a self-designed fitness path, and respond to daily electronic reminders to complete their activities. In addition to a general summary of our app, our competition, and some statistics, our board also listed some future plans for our app including more user customization of the app in reference to aesthetics, the creation of an avatar, and the additional tracking of the users diet and calorie intake. Here's a link to the photo of the poster
• Deanne Apke & Adriana Maldonado:
• Johanna Okerlund: Towards a Learning Analytics System for App Inventor: This poster summarizes the work done collecting and analyzing data from App Inventor projects to extract statistics that help measure the complexity of the programs and the proficiency of the App Inventor users. This work is a preliminary step towards a fine grained analysis of the steps a user takes in the writing of a program and an understanding of how people learn using App Inventor.
• Johanna Okerlund:Understanding App Inventor Errors- This poster summarizes data collected about runtime errors from the App Inventor error logs and expresses future plans to set up the means to collect more specific data and to improve debugging support in App Inventor.
• Shirley Lu:
• Tori Brown:
• Bhargavi Ramanathan: Making extensions to Quizly, an App Inventor teaching tool developed by Ralph Morelli. By modifying the way Quizly generated and modified JavaScript from the blocks in its workspace, functions that call helper functions and procedures that modify global variables, take no arguments, and return no values, can now be evaluated.

App Inventor Education Update

Link to Slides

1. Lyn Turbak - Mobile Computational Thinking
2. Shaileen Pokress - Resources; Gallery
3. Lyn Turbak - Templates
4. David Wolber - Java Bridge; Quizly
5. Mark Sherman - Assessing CT in mobile apps
6. Fred Martin - Surveys

Swimming Pool: Deep Dive into Selected Topics

People sorted into smaller groups to discuss topics that people wanted to discuss. No notes are available for this section

Thanks for coming!